New Google Groups in Beta

qwe writes "Google has apparently launched a new version of their Google Groups, currently in beta. It looks a lot like Gmail. One can attach a star to message threads. One can even create new groups, although they aren't actual Usenet groups."

Comments

Re:Promising yet limited...

[LostCluster]

On the other hand, Google seems to be in the business of only getting into things they can be #1 at doing.... it's quite possible that Google Groups will become the most read of such discussion sites after this goes live.

Besides, I'm sure all of these Groups will be completely included in Google's index, while Yahoo! Groups and Delphi Forums and other such sites are not because they usually require a signon to see most of the content.

Google is losing its main draw: SIMPLICITY.

[Qweezle]

As Google keeps expanding, they are looking more and more like a simplified Yahoo!.

Will Google put people off by losing the one thing that made them extremely individual in the big wide world of web search engines/portals?

Re:Gmail

[LostCluster]

Not true...

Blogger, AdWords, and AdSense accounts don't work there, yet...

Bah.

[jhesse]

I can make a *real* newsgroup. Ph33R M3!

(It's not rocket science. You just have to know the right codes to put in a newsgroup post.)

Re:This is great because it's Google

[1u3hr]

Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time. Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.

Actually, the original dejanews was better (before they got desperate and tried to become a portal). They respected the referrers headers and had largely correct threading. Google lumps all posts together with the same "Subject:" header, even if they're years apart. Also deja wouldn't let you respond to an old message (a month, I think), whereas I often see people who've obviously found a post with a Google search and responded to it, not noticing that it's a few years old.

Also, Google has picked up some groups on servers like Adobe.com and presents them as if they were normal newsgroups. However, they're not, and though Google lets you make a post to them, no one will answwer becasue they only see those posted via Adobe.

I'm not really happy that Google is blending their own groups with Usenet. Too many already can't tell the difference between web forums and Usenet.

Who owns the content?

[Hans Lehmann]

...although they aren't actual Usenet groups."

That's the part that worries me. I typed my first Usenet post over ten years ago, shortly after getting my first internet account (yeah, I know, I was on AOL, but we were all young and stupid once.) What struck me about Usenet was the properties that I soon learned applied to the Internet as a whole: Nobody owns Usenet or its content, nobody can easily regulate or censor Usenet, and Usenet tends to find its way around any distruptions in service (since it's not all stored on one giant server.) One day DajaNews started collecting and saving Usenet posts, making them available through their web site. I found that idea disturbing, sort of like when I saw my first Canter & Segal spam. I quickly realized, however, that given enough disk space and bandwidth I too could archive all the chatter and discourse that is Usenet, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me. Usenet discussions could theoretically be made immune to virtual book burning.

DejaNews was eventually bought by Google, which continues to archive most of the non-binary groups, as well as provide a web-based portal to Usenet. It does not, however, have the only copy of Usenet. Other companies like Yahoo, Delphi, ( and even Slashdot) have created their own user group systems, accessable only from their servers, and viewable only with a web browser (after all, what good is the Internet if you can't put banner ads on it?) If you don't like the way that your newsreader sorts & displays, you can get a different one, or even write your own. If you don't like the spam posts that Delphi weaves among regular ones, or the spam page that they present to you before allowing you to see a group, tough sh*t. You'll read Delphi postings the way they want you to , or you won't read them at all. If Delphi goes belly up, all their archived posts could go to the highest bidder, or maybe just disappear completely.

Google has always worn the white hats, so far. If they become as popular with these groups that "aren't actual Usenet groups." as they've gotten with their search engine, what happens if Usenet slowly dissappears when everyone jumps on the Googler bandwagon? What happens if this central database, owned by a single company, is no longer freely accessable?

BTW, I highly recommend GigaNews Usenet service. I've used them for about 5 years now; good consistant service, & they never tried to pull anything sneaky.

address mangling sucks

[Jamie Zawinski]

I just sent this to groups-support@google.com:

Please don't mangle email addresses in Google Groups!

I guess you are doing this because of some misguided belief that it will help with spam, but really all it does is decrease the utility of the internet as a communications medium. I do not hide my email address because I want people to be able to contact me, and the new Google Groups beta destroys the email addresses that I quite intentionally put in my messages. This is bad. Please don't do it.

Here's what the old way looked like: (old way)
And here's the new way: (new way)

What I consider bugs in the new way are:

1. destruction of email addresses in From, Sender, etc headers;

2. destruction of email addresses in the message body;

3. destruction of message IDs in the headers (because sometimes message IDs look like email addresses, you mangle them -- even though it's guarenteed that no email addresses will ever appear in the References or Message-ID headers.)

4. that the returned document is of type text/html instead of type text/plain. It was a good feature of the old system that the "Original Format" link returned a plain text version of the original, tabs and all. Sometimes you want to get at the message as it was actually posted, and not at some marked up approximation thereof.

Other than that, it looks very nice!

Re:Promising yet limited...

[CaptainTux]

I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off.

As a supporting example, I know at least 30-40 people who have told me "Oh, I read this thing on Google Groups" to which I sometimes replied "Yeah, Usenet can be great" and their response is "What is Usenet? This was on Google!"

Google is doing to Usenet what MS has done to the whole OS concept for a lot of people. Many people don't even realize there *are* other operating systems aside from MS Windows. In this case, many people don't realize there is a seperation between Google and Usenet. They don't understand that all Google does is provide an interface to a *much* older network that has been around since before many of them were even born. *That* my friends is strong branding. Google might not be muddying the waters on purpose but it's still pretty scary isn't it?